Here's my official statement in response to the recent controversy over certain comments that slipped out of my mouth during a LOOOONG interview that also happened to include many positive and not-so-controversial comments about KDE. I have now switched to using KDE on a daily basis and I am really enjoying it. Thanks for the feedback and keep on hacking! :-)

Comments

Have you found a better icon theme to suit your taste? On the positive side, I believe the KDE Artists will be working on making the default application icons more photo-realistic for KDE 3.1. At least your comments will give them more incentive to follow through!

He must be killing !
His desktop is so ugly.
I'am fed up with this OsX style and panel,please be more creative !
Think of E themes or even slick icons which are more original.
KDE is not and will never be OsX or XP, assume its difference.
Thanks...

Oh, for the love of God. EVERYONE assumes that the little panel centered in the middle of the screen at the bottom is a play on MacOS Xs panel. But those people would be and are ignorant about the fact that the CDE and FVWM (a likeness of CDE) has their panel in the center of the bottom of the screen, nad has for a hell of a lot longer than OS X has been around. Get a clue.

Hope the icons don't get too photo realistic. Too much detail in icons make them
harder too read. E.g. a trash bin shouldn't to look exactly like a real
life trach bin but rather like our mental concept of a general trash bin.
If they have too great detail they may clash with that mental concept and we
have to spend time analyzing the icon image, before we realize that is a
trash bin.

I fully agree with you.. however i think that all the bright (impress-the-geek-chicks) collors in the more photorealistic are kewl too. So i guess its up to the art-gods to find the right balance in this area :) Btw. the Home icon is kewl IMHO :D

I fully agree with you.. however i think that all the bright (impress-the-geek-chicks) collors in the more photorealistic are kewl too. So i guess its up to the art-gods to find the right balance in this area :) Btw. the Home icon is kewl IMHO :D

(Is it hard to intercept a dup page and > /dev/null it? Not that I would ask anyone to spend the time on my behalf when I'm the faulty-clicking one... but others make them as well, when net is laggy/jumpy/slow)

I think it was a nice reply, and probably something that wasn't too easy to do. Usually when you get flamed a lot you tend to get defensive and hold on to your opinion. Apparently Bart can admit that little slip and get on with it. :)

And betray your company's Hancom Linux?
Wait, you don't have to use RedHat to use KDE 3.0. You could use QNX For KDE, get iKons, change that "W" icons, and practice consitency between icons. You can compile GNX For KDE 3 yourself... (don't tell me, you can't compile!)

If you want to avoid an ugly desktop you have to take care that GTK theme (see your Gimp) matches the rest of KDE desktop. Icons on your Kicker are too muxh mixed: everaldos Crystal theme, Mozilla's redstar which is scaled to 48x48 (missing size), Gnome terminal icon doesn't go well with the rest of icons and that 'W' icon (probably Hancom Word) which is not created in 48x48 size is destroyed by scaling. Advice: no matter which icon theme you use, keep your icons consistent.

And I am curious: you are talking about a new icon theme for KDE and you say it will be beautiful. How come that we've never seen a preview of it on kde-artists mailing list? Or maybe you know something that I don't know.

Too me the crystall icons really suck, the only ones worse are Mandrake's! How they can produce such nice looking install, boot process and apps and then stick all those ugly icons all over the place is beyond me. I've found that going with an aqua theme in linux is about the only way to have a consistent user interface, because everyone has copied it. Much to apple's chagrin. Eric Yang produced some the most beautiful, flattering, knock offs of aqua I have ever seen. He created an enlightenment theme with a dockbar in the center that looks amazingly like a screenshot of the new imac on apple's site. Add all the various xmms, gkrellm etc. skins, kde aqua theme, and GTk aqua, and you can create one magnificient illusion. Until you fire up mozilla :(

Hi there. I am a newbie to linux.
I have just installed it and downloaded the aqua theme from kde's site.
But it doesnt look like imac much cause the title bar has been changed to look different from osX. Can someone mail me the theme please.
My email address is -gladiator34@rediffmail.com

i am really looking for a ugly desktop,i mean ugly with a head cutt off or a big sign that says "fuck my parents" ,if anyone has or knows a place where i can get them ,thanks in advance ,oh by the way i am really depressed now..

Ho can this guy have such a senior position in a leading linux company?
Look at this gem he posted on slashdot (in the thread on his interview):

>there are fashions in product naming, and if you violate those fashions, names >sound kind of odd. There's a reason people make good money worrying about >these issues.
>For instance, during the dot-com phase, everyone put ".com" in their company >name, but by now, everyone's removed that from their company name. Also, a few >years ago, it was very popular to make compound words with capitals in the >middle (HancomLinux) - but now that's not so popular anymore.
>Similarly, single letters go through periods where they are hot and not. So a >few years ago, everyone loved using the letter Q in company names (Quantum >etc.). But that's really old now. When Eazel picked Z that was a decent >marketing decision (in addition to the fact that the Easel.com domain was not >available). In my personal opinion, the overuse of the letter K in all things >related to the KDE project gets old very quick and is not a huge asset. But >I'm sure KDE users feel the same about Galeon, Gnumeric and all the other G->words that are connected with GNOME. I just think the letter G is overall more >elegant - it sounds smooth and looks round, whereas the letter K is so, well, >square. Also, once I heard that KDE originally stood for Kool Desktop >Environment I could never quite get that thought of my head - and that's kind >of a traumatic thought:) (I fully appreciate that GNU Network MOdel >Environment is quite a mouthful). There - for what that's worth :)

Recapitulating: this guy is paid a hefty amount of money to market a product, and it turns out that his marketing strategy (judging from the above post) is that of follwing the latest stupid fashion, with the result of completely hiding his product in the middle of other, similar-sounding names.
Good. Now, to me all this sounds pretty stupid. It is quite obvious (to me at least) that the reason why Linux was the media darling until recently is precisely because of the funny name, the penguin, the story "finnish student decides to write an OS" etc. Can you imagine all those articles about Linux (and Linus) being written about the usual suit, a la Bart Decrem? "We sell productivity solutions". Really? How exciting! If i would ever need some marketing for any of my projects i would spend my money on ESR's advice instead - the way he imposed the term "opensource" (and himself), in the linux world -- well, THAT is a true marketing masterpiece!

You need to look at current fashions to see what will seem like a good product name to most people (that this matters is sad, I know, but unfortunately, for the majority of people, i.e. those unaware of the issues about naming, it will). I believe the point he tries to make is that you must pay attention to what names are common and are perceived by average 'Joe User' to be that of an up-to-date product (i.e. calling a product Wibble/386 1.0 will make it sound rather archaic, calling it Wibble 98, Wibble 2000 or even Wibble 3001 will seem to be the name of a product of yesteryear to your average M$ user).

If you put your knowledge about the issues and how much/little a name/brand really counts, you should be able to look at the impressions that names generate.

For a simple exercise, take a list of current and not-so-current software package names and versions, and replace the indentifying bits of the names with gibberish (e.g. change Windows 2000 to MyWibble 2000, Linux kernel 2.1.27ac34 to FreshMash 2.1.27ac34 etc.) and then look down the list at different names, giving yourself about 1/2 a second to decide how up-to-date the product sounds.

Well first off, I'd like to say I'm really pleasantly surprised by what a good sport Bart is being about all this. I mean, the fella never said anything bad about KDE except that it didn't fit into his aesthetic taste, and everybody goes batsh*t.

Seriously -- do we use KDE because it's good looking or because it's a solid and well designed environment? I, personally, came over from BeOS a couple years ago and frankly neither GNOME or KDE look or feel anywhere near as good as BeOS did. I chose KDE quickly, after attempting to port my code to gtk; frankly I found the api a bit crude, whereas QT/KDE was much more in the simple OO style of BeOS (for reference, I was able to port my BeOS programs to Qt quite quickly). I feel uncomfortable using a desktop which I can't enjoy writing code for, so the problem resolved itself.

Luckily for me, KDE looks great these days -- in fact, I don't even have the desire to port my GONX style from KDE 2 to 3 since I think light3 is fantastic (though if anybody wants GONX for kde3 I might give it a go. As far as I can tell everybody these days goes banannas over liquid and krystal and keramic, which I find distracting, childlike, and ugly, but hell: that's my opinion, and not a statement of fact). Nonetheless, it's irrelevant. Even if KDE still looked like it did when I started using it and writing code for it back in the 1.x days, I'd still love it, because it's solidly designed, well documented, and in my experience completely stable.

Anyway, I'm glad to see that this preposterous tumult has died down, but I have to say I'm saddened that it took this level of self-deprecation from Bart to make it happen. At least his "press release" is in good humor, and it seems like there are no hard feelings. Kudos to Bart!

----<< As far as I can tell everybody these days goes banannas over liquid and krystal and keramic, which I find distracting, childlike, and ugly, but hell: that's my opinion >>----

I think its great that people have such diverse tastes. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and KDE can cater for most tastes. I personally think Keramic Accessories ( http://apps.kde.com/uk/0/info/vid/6309 ) is stunning. Visually, KDE is going from strength to strength.

Where KDE still needs work IMO is with consistency across the desktop. Even with KDE 3.0 I find that things are not always where I logically expect to find them. I repeatedly trip over the absence of RMB cut/copy/paste for Konsole - because I habitually use it in so many other places in KDE, and GNOME, and MS Windows (which I unfortunately have to use too).

Or there are menu options I might use once in a lifetime that get in the way of other options I use frequently, The RMB menu in Konqueror for example is starting to get way too crowded. Applications (like cervisia and pixie) should park themselves under "Open with..." not directly on the first menu where they are in the way of the Properties option.

Which makes me wonder -- how do I remove Cervisa from the konq toolbar (not RMB)? I have no doubt it's nice & useful for those who do lots of cvs work, but I don't. In fact, the few times I *have* I did it from the command line because I was too uncertain of the mechanisms to feel comfortable letting it be automated.

This sucks. First I cannot disable those smileys I hate from Kopete, now I have to see them on here as well. Damnit. Can't we just happily use and and keep some respect for the history of the Internet?

It hurts my eyes. Please let me disable it in my user preferences. And kopete-hackers, damnit, grant me my wish and include an option to disable these headache inducers.